Webmaster General Forum

A proposal to prevent Internet service providers from charging Web firms more for faster service to consumers failed yesterday to clear a Senate committee.

The vote was a setback for such companies as Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Skype Technologies SA, which had pushed for rules that would prohibit telecommunications companies from controlling the flow of online content. The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee took up the matter as part of a larger telecommunications bill, which passed 15 to 7. But some telecom experts said the party-line, 11 to 11 vote on "net neutrality" could signal a tougher fight to get the larger telecom bill passed on the Senate floor.

Hello all. I am not really up on this Net Neutrality, though I need to learn about it.

How will it affect the small business person? Is this just another way for the phone companies to screw us?

Where is the best place to go to learn more about this and is there anything we can do? Will writing our senators and congressmen do anything? I found one website today and signed the petition that was to be sent directly to our local congressmen and senators, however, I am never sure if that gets anywhere.

This sounds to me like the usual rich get richer thing while the little guy gets to pay for it all in the end.

As far as I can tell this has no influence on the ordainary mom 'n pop business. I am willing to take a bet that 90%-99% of webmasters here will be unaffected.

Some of the big guys with lots of marketing muscle would like to have it look that way. It's just hype to protect their own interest.

This will mean increased costs for the big guys, like Google, Yahoo, MSN, but probably also for smaller bandwith hogs like YouTube, internet radio, Skype, etc.

>> Is this just another way for the phone companies to screw us?

Of course this opens all kinds of theoretical possibilities. And telcos are greedy by nature. But then no more than most companies are.

But I wouldn't believe the hype myself. Telco's have learned the AOL lesson; no customers today would want a walled garden for common web content. Multimedia-content is something else (sofar, but that may change)

So, this is not for regulating traffic to your standard HTML pages. Not even if they feature a shopping cart, or ads.

Heard of call-back? Read about California? We have control, if we care enough to use it. But politics aren't welcome in the thread. We can discuss the impact of political decisions, but for the benefit of the board, the politcal discussions need to happen elswhere.

Congress is pushing a law that would abandon the Internet's First Amendment -- a principle called Network Neutrality that prevents companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from deciding which Web sites work best for you -- based on what site pays them the most. If the public doesn't speak up now, our elected officials will cave to a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign.

AT&T was given monopoly powers by the government early in the 20th century. Because of this, they were required to provide equal service to all via common carrier laws.

There is no freedom in letting a monopoly (which exists due to the goverment's squelching of competition) disavow its commitment to common carrier rules simply because telephone lines are now used for Internet traffic in addition to telephone calls.

If you truly want freedom in this area, get in a time machine, go back to 1917 and stop AT&T from gaining the monoploy status which they now want to use to overchange and/or silence their customers and their competition.